I Predict A Riot - Russia's Circular History

The most notable news story from Russia in recent weeks has been the arrest and trial of the three members of Pussy Riot. This is the female punk band that staged an anti-Putin protest with a satirical hymn to the Virgin Mary in Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow during the run up to the Presidential elections earlier this year (although it is to be noted the music track on the video below was not played in the Cathedral, but overlayed when it was uploaded to Youtube and the world).

Needless to say, their performance was executed without the approval of the religious authorities of the Russian Orthodox Church and the women are now facing up to seven years in jail for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred." Their trial began last week and appears to be a parody of justice - the prosecution witnesses talk about how they felt hearing the song, while only three of the thirteen defence witnesses have been allowed to be called. The prosecution witnesses are questioned about their religious beliefs, giving them full opportunity to stigmatise the defendants as blasphemers, while any attempts to show the defence witnesses to also have Christian beliefs have been repeatedly ruled out of order.

 Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and
Maria Alekhina  face 7 years in jail.

It is a case that even RT News has admitted is dividing Russia between those who cling to Putin's nostalgic and increasingly repressive nationalism, and those who for the last two decades have been working for a free, democratic society where freedom of expression is a given. It is of little surprise to discover that the group was motivated to stage its protest where it did because of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch's public call for worshippers to vote for Putin. This was/is at a time when millions of Russians were protesting their suspicions of the President's "manipulation" of first the Parliamentary and then the Presidential elections. As the established Church in Russia - the Patriarch swears the President into office - its head should be at least formally neutral but, in the "managed democracy" that is the Russian Republic, this was blatantly broken - but  unlike the singers, no cleric has faced any charges such as abuse of office or breach of election law.

The outcome is expected soon. Putin appears mildly embarrassed by the international attention it has drawn, with politicians and celebrities across the world calling for the charges to be dropped. Today, he seemed to be suggesting there should be some degree of leniency shown in sentencing (this before a verdict is given). But it is already too late for him to pretend that somehow Russia has any sort of functioning civil society: the struggle between authoritarians and liberals is now fully on, and the trial is only one of several aspects of this, including the unprecedented range of anti-government demonstrations in recent months.

Supporters see the case as key to freedom of speech in Russia

For Russia, it is not an unfamiliar scenario, at least in the perspective of history. Almost exactly 99 years ago, Czarist Russia was rocked by a strikingly similar set of circumstances, albeit with rather different and more serious charges involved. Likewise, it marked a turning point in the political struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism.

In Kiev, in spring 1911, a young boy, Andrei Yutshinsky, was found murdered, stabbed dozens of times in what the rightwing "Black Hundreds" (who agitated violently on behalf of the Czar) and the gutter press quickly decided was a ritual murder of a Christian by Jews. A witch-hunt followed with a Jewish man, Mendel Beilis, arrested and charged in spite of a total lack of evidence - but in the two years he waited in prison for his trial, he was utterly demonised as a "Drinker of Christian Blood". His wish to do such a thing was based on the false "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a tract written by the Czar's police, which created the myth of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the Christian world: Hitler later used it to great effect.

Two Russian policemen discovered the truth - the boy had in fact discovered that a friend's mother had been involved with a black market gang and threatened to report her, only to be murdered by the gang. However, on the Czar Nicholas' orders, they were dismissed and the prosecution of Beilis went ahead in September 1913 in order to "prove" the Jewish conspiracy theory was real. The Judge was met by the Czar and promised promotion if there was a conviction; the jury was packed with Government sympathisers and the defence was repeatedly denied the right to put its full case.

Outside the Court, Russian society was fractured, with liberal and socialist parties calling for Beliss' acquittal and decrying the whole affair as a disgrace to Russia' faltering steps towards a modern society. By contrast, the nationalists and royalists called full throttle for Beilis' execution and the expulsion of the Jews (tens of thousands had been murdered in recent years in vicious pogroms tacitly encouraged by the authorities). Abroad, the celebrities of the day petitioned for Beilis' freedom - H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy, academics, politicians and students among them.

In the end, the case against Beilis was so thin that even the biased Court proceedings and the pro-Czarist jury didn't convict him. He was released and fled the country within a few weeks, never to return. But the Czarist Government continued with its repression unabated, the Beilis case being perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the very limited political and social reforms following the 1905/6 Revolution.

Putin and his coterie of course look back wistfully to the Czarist days and the ceremony around the Russian Government now owes much to the Romanov Court in its final days. Likewise, the restored, pre-eminent position of the Orthodox Church, used by the State now in the same way as the Czar to associate good, normal Russians with God and the President.

But as we await the outcome of this trial, a key one for freedom in Russia, Putin might do well to reflect that in less than four years after the Beilis case, the whole rotten edifice of Romanov Imperial Russia was to collapse in the flames of the revolutions of 1917. No autocracy can last forever. "Czar" came from the title "Caesar" in the old Byzantine Empire, where Emperors on their Coronation Day were accompanied by two men, one of whom whispered constantly to the ruler, "Remember, you are mortal." And the other one measured him for his coffin.

Melting the Cold War: Gorbachev at 80

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, turned 80 on 2 March and this evening a gala concert is being held in London to mark the event and seek to raise millions for cancer charities in memory of his wife Raisa, who died of the illness. International pop stars and singers have gathered at some cost to remember a man whose time in power marked the end of an era, of a system and a country.

This evening, RT ran an interview with his translator and assistant, Pavel Palazchenko, the mustachioed man who seemed constantly at his side as he shuttled from Rekjavik to Helsinki and New York in the round of diplomatic initiatives that marked the end of the thirty year "Cold War". He mentioned his regrets about many of the things that happened in Russia following Gorbachev's downfall at the end of 1991, but, he remarked, compared to the world of 30 years ago, he had no regrets about his involvement with Gorbachev and his "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (reconstruction) initiatives.

In some ways, he is very right - for those of us who remember the constant international tensions of the 1970s and 1980s, the Americans' increasing belligerence under Reagan with their talk of the viability of "limited nuclear war" and the ludicrous "Star Wars" programme, it does well to stop and consider that the world of today, for all its multiple ills, no longer has an international system constructed on such appalling concepts as "Mutually Assured Destruction" by mass nuclear conflagration. The very worst of the dreadful acts played out in Iraq and Libya, or the very worst imaginable al-Qaeda attack, are as nothing to the crisis of 1961, when Kennedy and Khrushchev eyeballed each other over Cuba. Nor do they compare to the potentially much worse 26 September 1983 incident when an accidental nuclear war was avoided only by the prompt thinking of Soviet airforce officer Stanislav Petrov, who correctly diagnosed as false an attack alarm.

And in the former Soviet Union, some states enjoy a degree of political freedom that was unprecedented in the Soviet era. Gorbachev's liberalism has flourished in places such as Estonia, though in others, such as Lithuania, it has been tarnished by deep seated anti-semitism, persecution of the Romany and even of ethnic Russians. Elsewhere, many of the nationalist hatred suppressed (though sadly not removed) by the Soviet era have resurfaced, often violently, and some successor states, like Belarus and Uzbekistan, have become the personal fiefdoms of dictators with powers rivalling Stalin at his worst.

And of course Russia itself, the heartlands of the former Soviet Empire, is today far from free. Putin's methods of autocratic rule are not of the level of the old days, but we see a nationalist state, with limited political choice, a managed media, over-powerful private corporations and a willingness to squash genuine dissent by extra-legal means - rather like its old rival, the United States.

In addition, the early 1990s saw the destruction of many of the highly successful social gains of the old Communist states - health and education services collapsed as industry was privatised into the hands of robber-barons, inequality rocketed and political freedoms became meaningless as people went hungry. I well recall some friends who went on a school exchange to Moscow to be hosted by a Russian family who had saved up all year to treat them to a meal in the then sole branch of McDonalds in the Russian capital - in spite of my friends' offers and protests, their hosts waited outside while they ate, unable to afford to join them but too proud to accept a treat from their guests. For many Russians, they could say what they wanted, but with empty mouths. Little wonder then that at his final shot at the Russian Presidency, the hero of Glasnost polled less than 1% of the vote.

To be fair to Gorbachev, much of the privatisation and full-on rush to naked capitalism happened under his successors, egged on by the Thatcher Foundation and other western think tanks and well-paid economic consultants. The emergent, oil-soaked kleptocracy has been labelled with all manner of opprobrium by the West, but the truth is that Russia today is a strong reflection of its critics, perhaps discomfited that it has succeeded in rivalling them once more as a world power, though one more in the Czarist than Communist tradition.

We should thank him for his positive achievements - it is too easy to forget (and for growing numbers born since the mid-1980s, something completely unknown) how truly frightening some periods of confrontation were in the early 1980s. It was not just peace campaigners who thought the holocaust could be imminent - both then and now we know many American military planners were quite eagerly contemplating circumstances where they might turn Europe into a radioactive desert, somehow believing America might acceptably survive such a scenario.

Yet on the other side, the fall of the Soviet Bloc also, bizarrely, marked a headlong rush from socialism by the Left. In country after country, Communist and Socialist groups renounced their ideologies and even their names, pandering to a zeitgeist a la New Labour that, as Fukyama prematurely declared, we had reached the end of history and liberal capitalism was the only game in town.

Gorbachev - architect of glasnost

I like to think that we know better now, understanding that the old Soviet states were neither socialist nor Marxist in the true sense of these words. And that many people across the world are slowly re-embracing the concepts of social justice, community and equality, not least to face the challenges of resource depletion and climate change. In a number of countries, the Communists or their successor parties have even been re-elected to office, amply demonstrating that the old claims that these regimes were universally hated by their citizens were nothing but western myths and lies.

So I wish Mr Gorbachev a happy 80th birthday, and hope that an evening with Elton John and Shirley Bassey does not spoil it too much for him. But his legacy is a mixed one. While we should undoubtedly be grateful that his bold efforts made the world much safer, for a time at least, and perhaps gave it the breathing space it needed to reconfigure itself to face the new, equally fatal challenges of climate change, we need to cut past any uncritical celebration of the man to remember that the "New World Order" that subsequently emerged is not the one we need to save our species from itself.